Festival Spotlight: Mavis Staples

Long before Mavis Staples became an unlikely favorite of Wilco fans, she was a gospel legend. As she told John Seabrook in a Talk of the Town piece last year, she began singing with her siblings in the nineteen-forties, when their father, Roebuck (Pops) Staples, taught them the song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” She was eight years old.

The Staples Singers—Mavis, Yvonne, Pervis, and Cleotha—broke out as a soul group in the fifties and sixties, becoming one of the most indelible music acts of civil-rights movement. By the seventies, they were recording Top 40 hits. “When we started doing songs like ‘I’ll Take You There’ and ‘Respect Yourself,’ ” she told Seabrook, “the church people got all upset, saying we were playing the Devil’s music and whatnot, but those songs are about the Lord. ‘I’ll Take You There’? Where’s ‘there’?”

Last year, Staples, at seventy-one, teamed up with Jeff Tweedy, the lead singer of Wilco, for her Grammy-winning album, “You Are Not Alone.” On October 1st, she’ll be sitting down with Lawrence Wright to talk about her sixty-year career. (Buy tickets.) She’ll also be singing some songs. Yvonne will be in the audience.

Below, a sampling of Staples’s collaboration with Tweedy:

Illustration by Tom Bachtell.

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